If they were able to bring a 3-ton meteorite out of the tundra to the foundation headquarters, why couldn't they have managed to bring back even a scrap of the supposed alien wreckage?
because the Euro-trash companies were charging.20 cents per kilobyte
Are you sure you don't mean 0.20 $/kb, or 0.20 euro/kb? This mixup between dollars and cents is the same thing that got Verizon very publicly humiliated for not recognizing the difference.
Unlike Verizon, I wish you no ridicule, so I hope you accept this comment gently.
I know, I know, the "fast" in that old adage refers to how quickly you want it produced, not how fast the device actually is. This is just a play on the article title.
Table ES-1 in the executive summary suggests server consolidation at various levels (moderate, aggressive, etc.). Server consolidation can be done in a number of ways, with virtualization being one of the most effective and popular.
a sign saying DANGER GET OFF may have saved a few though
Not likely. The bridge was bumper-to-bumper standstill traffic at the time, and the bridge was over 300 m across. Even if an alarm had been sounded, signalling imminent danger, it's not like the cars could have gone anywhere, nor could people have run very far, before calamity struck.
If the name of the author is familiar, it is because Frank Abagnale's exploits were popularized in the 2002 movieCatch Me If You Can. Leo DiCaprio played the Abagnale, with Tom Hanks as Carl Hanratty, the FBI agent tracking him down.
Given Abagnale's extensive knowledge and experience in check (and other) fraud, he speaks with some authority on the sad state of how easy identity theft can be.
Well, nicotine is a tremendously addictive substance, like heroin, and a powerful stimulant to the body. It screws around with the all kinds of chemical receptors in the brain, including the ones that allow you to feel good. This is why a smoker in need of a fix is usually irritable and grumpy before taking that first sweet drag.
But, you are right, the real danger with smoking is, well, smoking all the other shit that's in cigarettes - the nicotine is a secondary concern. The danger of the nicotine in cigarettes is the fact that it keeps you addicted.
My watch, a Citizen Eco-Drive, has a small solar cell array under the translucent face. When fully charged, it will keep running in the dark for several months at least. It receives enough light during my normal day (even when hiding under the cuffs of my shirt) such that it's never run out of power.
Fact: Valerie Plame was a CIA agent working with an unofficial, undisclosed cover. A secret agent, if you will.
Fact: Valerie Plame's identity and her "secret agent" status was leaked to several members of the media, who publshed this information.
Fact: Outting an undercover CIA agent is a federal crime - a breach of national security because it can seriously hamper the CIA's ability to operate abroad. This crime did, indisputably, take place. The reporters's didn't all suddenly get this information through divine revelation - it was given to them. This is the reason the special prosecutor investigation was initiated in the first place - to find out who leaked Plame's identity to the media.
All evidence collected thus far strongly points to the leak coming from inside the White House. Presumptive motive: to discredit Plame's husband, Wilson, who was publicly discrediting the false intelligence the Administration was using to push for the war in Iraq.
Prosecutor Fitzgerald was unable to pull together enough evidence to definitively charge any one person with revealing Plame's identity. This does not constitute the absence of a crime. The fact that her cover was blown to the media is the crime. The possibility that her career was destroyed as political retribution against her husband makes it a rather petty crime.
Libby was indicted and convicted of lying to a grand jury and obstructing the prosecutor's case. These are crimes - the President himself agreed to this in his statement this evening. He did not dispute the conviction itself. The President didn't go so far as to pardon Libby outright, because it is clear that Libby was guilty of these crimes. For the President to pardon Libby outright would, at this point, be tantamount to announcing that his administration was guilty of the original crime, except that no one would have to face any punishment for it.
It's not like he got off scott free. He's still got the conviction on his record, and is looking at a $250,000 fine. Oh, and two years' probation, in case he's ever in a position to perjure himself in a Federal investigation again.
I speak this in the same ironic voice that Verbal Kint used in The Usual Suspects: "Well, I do have the weapons charge; I'm looking at six whole months' hard time."
According to the President's statement, the 30-month sentence was too harsh for a first-time offender with a long history of public service. So, instead of reducing it to something he felt more reasonable, he commuted it altogether. The President didn't contest the conviction; he 'respect[ed] the jury's verdict"; he even commended prosecutor Fitzgerald for carrying out his duties professionally. He simply felt that, ah well, Scooter doesn't really need to be punished for covering-up a breach of national security. He's rewarding the fall-guy.
But, you know what, in the long run, I'm OK with this. Sure, it's a miscarriage of Justice. Such things happen often enough. Unlike most miscarriages of justice, however, this one won't be forgotten so quickly. It is an extremely revealing demonstration for everyone but the most die-hard Bush fan that this administration feels it is above the law. The deeper that message can be driven into the American People, the better. If the President believes that this will go over well with the populace, or even within the leadership of his own party, he has seriously miscalculated.
Even if the math can be extended to a time before the Big Bang, is there any way to test the predictions? My understanding is that, if there even was anything before the Big Bang, any information (in the Claude Shannon, Information Theory sense) about it wouldn't have passed through that event to this here and now. It's much like there is debate about whether any information that passes the event horizon of a black hole can ever be recovered. The information may well be there, but can we get at it?
Renaud doesn't think Dynahand is secure enough for protecting sensitive information, such as bank accounts or health records. Rather, she believes it could be useful for social sites, where a user wants her account to be private but where nothing disastrous would happen if someone broke into it.
The folks at Dynahand obviously don't know how bad hijacking someone's social network identity could be. While not as sensitive as banking or medical information, access to one's online profile is a pretty sensitive thing. A person pretending to be you on MySpace or Facebook could cause all kinds of damage to your reputation, lose you (real) friends, and leave an incriminating trail for any future employer to find. Even if you are able to regain control of your account via customer service, and could remove the offending material from your page, nothing is every really deleted from the Internet.
It used to be that a war's home front consisted of a lot of sacrifice - not just sending the boys off to fight and die, but also making do with less, shortages and rationing, and, of course, higher taxes to pay for the military expenditure. Now we somehow think that we can fight a war without sacrifice. In the particular case of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the President and Congress seemed to feel that we could not only afford a $750 billion open-ended war (probably over $1 trillion before all is said and done), but could even afford tax cuts for the most well-off at the same time.
The President and Congress (2001-present) don't even feel the need to account for the cost of this prolonged war in the normal budget - it requires periodic "emergency" spending so that everyone's precious balanced budget fuzzy calculations can still work out.
Even though I think it's a fax machine in the picture, not an inkjet printer, I think it is safe to say that the image pretty well represents everyone's feelings on this matter.
This doesn't exactly ban or rule out the possibility of gerrymandering, but Iowa instituted a much fairer way of redistricting back in the early 80s. Instead of the legislature drawing the lines, an independent committee (4 appointments from each caucus, plus a chairperson) draws up three new redistricted maps with the following guidelines:
1 - population equality,
2 - contiguity,
3 - unity of counties and cities (maintaining county lines and "nesting" house districts within
senate districts and senate districts within congressional districts), and
4 - compactness.
When you look at these guidelines, you'll find it tries to do the same thing that various mathematical algorithms, which others have suggested in response to the parent post, try to do. The three proposed maps are sent to the legislature, who attempt to choose one in a simple take-it-or-leave-it vote, with contingencies if the legislature can't decide on one.
The result is that four of five congressional districts in Iowa are consistently competitive and mirror the state's overall political makeup. Compare that to about 50 of 435 congressional districts nationwide being competitive, despite the nearly even split between Democrats and Republicans.
Some Iowa politicians grumble when they have to move their home to stay within their redrawn district, but by and large everyone feels that the system is fair and equitable. Neither party considers abusing the system, because they realize how blatant it would appear, and because they know that the next time the same abuse could be revisited on them.
I've had to look into finding a keyboard that could be repeatedly autoclaved (high pressure steam at 250-350 Fahrenheit) so that it could be used in an operating room during surgery. I had limited success with that - you can find different keyboards that are encased in silicone. They become unusable after a handful of cleaning cycles, however. The harder part was finding a pointing device - mouse, trackpad, etc.
For myself, I have gone months at a time without a cellphone, TV, computer, or portable music player. I didn't miss them much. This wasn't in the distant past, either, this is several times over the last decade. The key to this was the simple fact that I was well away from the hustle and bustle of my usual life. I was not at my everyday tech job, nor at my heavily tech-invested college, nor even in a major city. For portions of this time I was at a large ranch in the southwest U.S., where the main means of communication was CB radio; in a foreign country that was not heavily modernized; and on a boat skirting oceanic coastline. I didn't miss the tech because there was no real need for it - it would have seemed quite out of place, actually.
I have in recent times, and in my usual techie world, tried to do without a lot of modern gadgetry. By and large, though, it is hard to simply set aside. I am a practicing engineer doing a lot of mechanical design work - I simply could not do my work without a computer. I call up datasheets and other reference information hourly from the Internet. I do not have a landline, and so rely on my cellphone. I type much faster than I write longhand, so I usually email my long-distance friends and relatives instead of sending letters.
I have made some concessions to toning down my digital life. I don't find cable television to be worth the exhorbitant rates they charge, and broadcast TV is filled with a lot of vacuous crap, so I watch about 2 hours of TV a week. My iPod just died; I am waiting to see how the iPhone pans out, or whether Apple will release a 6th-gen iPod this year. Very few people have my cell #, so I receive about 20 calls per week on it; rarely is anything urgent enough that a landline and answering machine couldn't have handled it.
So, I guess one could say that the context matters in how successfully you can ween yourself from technology. Some lifestyles and work-styles have been enabled by modern gadgetry, and simply couldn't exist without it. In other contexts, the gadgetry is superfluous, a sort of reverse anachronism, if you will.
You have a bathroom in your house. I walk down the street and want to use that bathroom. I walk up to the front door and, since the door isn't locked, waltz on in and do my business. I asked the door if it was OK to come inside (by handshaking, you could say) and, because it didn't bar me access, assumed it was ok. I mean, come on, I can't be held responsible if the owner of the house doesn't know how to lock the door. However, that unlocked door excuse doesn't prevent me from being charged with trespassing, B&E, etc.
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If they were able to bring a 3-ton meteorite out of the tundra to the foundation headquarters, why couldn't they have managed to bring back even a scrap of the supposed alien wreckage?
because the Euro-trash companies were charging .20 cents per kilobyte
Are you sure you don't mean 0.20 $/kb, or 0.20 euro/kb? This mixup between dollars and cents is the same thing that got Verizon very publicly humiliated for not recognizing the difference.
Unlike Verizon, I wish you no ridicule, so I hope you accept this comment gently.
Pick Any Two.
I know, I know, the "fast" in that old adage refers to how quickly you want it produced, not how fast the device actually is. This is just a play on the article title.
No one who starts a reply with "LOL," especially an Anonymous Coward, should be modded insightful. Ever.
Table ES-1 in the executive summary suggests server consolidation at various levels (moderate, aggressive, etc.). Server consolidation can be done in a number of ways, with virtualization being one of the most effective and popular.
So, has anyone yet found the lost original tapes of the Apollo 11 landing?
You might also check out the research of Hany Farid, a CS researcher at Dartmouth who has come up with algorithms to detect if an image has been doctored.
If you search through the whole top500 list, you'll find these Ivy Leaguers with Blue Gene computers:
#93 Harvard
#382 Princeton
But, there are plenty of other US schools on the list with Blue Gene computers (and a many outside the U.S. as well):
#5 SUNY Stony Brook
#7 Renssellaer Polytechnic
#63 California-San Diego #374 Boston University
#376 Iowa State
#379 MIT
#383 Alabama-Birmingham
If the name of the author is familiar, it is because Frank Abagnale's exploits were popularized in the 2002 movie Catch Me If You Can. Leo DiCaprio played the Abagnale, with Tom Hanks as Carl Hanratty, the FBI agent tracking him down.
Given Abagnale's extensive knowledge and experience in check (and other) fraud, he speaks with some authority on the sad state of how easy identity theft can be.
Well, nicotine is a tremendously addictive substance, like heroin, and a powerful stimulant to the body. It screws around with the all kinds of chemical receptors in the brain, including the ones that allow you to feel good. This is why a smoker in need of a fix is usually irritable and grumpy before taking that first sweet drag.
But, you are right, the real danger with smoking is, well, smoking all the other shit that's in cigarettes - the nicotine is a secondary concern. The danger of the nicotine in cigarettes is the fact that it keeps you addicted.
My watch, a Citizen Eco-Drive, has a small solar cell array under the translucent face. When fully charged, it will keep running in the dark for several months at least. It receives enough light during my normal day (even when hiding under the cuffs of my shirt) such that it's never run out of power.
Fact: Valerie Plame was a CIA agent working with an unofficial, undisclosed cover. A secret agent, if you will.
Fact: Valerie Plame's identity and her "secret agent" status was leaked to several members of the media, who publshed this information.
Fact: Outting an undercover CIA agent is a federal crime - a breach of national security because it can seriously hamper the CIA's ability to operate abroad. This crime did, indisputably, take place. The reporters's didn't all suddenly get this information through divine revelation - it was given to them. This is the reason the special prosecutor investigation was initiated in the first place - to find out who leaked Plame's identity to the media.
All evidence collected thus far strongly points to the leak coming from inside the White House. Presumptive motive: to discredit Plame's husband, Wilson, who was publicly discrediting the false intelligence the Administration was using to push for the war in Iraq.
Prosecutor Fitzgerald was unable to pull together enough evidence to definitively charge any one person with revealing Plame's identity. This does not constitute the absence of a crime. The fact that her cover was blown to the media is the crime. The possibility that her career was destroyed as political retribution against her husband makes it a rather petty crime.
Libby was indicted and convicted of lying to a grand jury and obstructing the prosecutor's case. These are crimes - the President himself agreed to this in his statement this evening. He did not dispute the conviction itself. The President didn't go so far as to pardon Libby outright, because it is clear that Libby was guilty of these crimes. For the President to pardon Libby outright would, at this point, be tantamount to announcing that his administration was guilty of the original crime, except that no one would have to face any punishment for it.
It's not like he got off scott free. He's still got the conviction on his record, and is looking at a $250,000 fine. Oh, and two years' probation, in case he's ever in a position to perjure himself in a Federal investigation again.
I speak this in the same ironic voice that Verbal Kint used in The Usual Suspects : "Well, I do have the weapons charge; I'm looking at six whole months' hard time."
According to the President's statement, the 30-month sentence was too harsh for a first-time offender with a long history of public service. So, instead of reducing it to something he felt more reasonable, he commuted it altogether. The President didn't contest the conviction; he 'respect[ed] the jury's verdict"; he even commended prosecutor Fitzgerald for carrying out his duties professionally. He simply felt that, ah well, Scooter doesn't really need to be punished for covering-up a breach of national security. He's rewarding the fall-guy.
But, you know what, in the long run, I'm OK with this. Sure, it's a miscarriage of Justice. Such things happen often enough. Unlike most miscarriages of justice, however, this one won't be forgotten so quickly. It is an extremely revealing demonstration for everyone but the most die-hard Bush fan that this administration feels it is above the law. The deeper that message can be driven into the American People, the better. If the President believes that this will go over well with the populace, or even within the leadership of his own party, he has seriously miscalculated.
Even if the math can be extended to a time before the Big Bang, is there any way to test the predictions? My understanding is that, if there even was anything before the Big Bang, any information (in the Claude Shannon, Information Theory sense) about it wouldn't have passed through that event to this here and now. It's much like there is debate about whether any information that passes the event horizon of a black hole can ever be recovered. The information may well be there, but can we get at it?
The folks at Dynahand obviously don't know how bad hijacking someone's social network identity could be. While not as sensitive as banking or medical information, access to one's online profile is a pretty sensitive thing. A person pretending to be you on MySpace or Facebook could cause all kinds of damage to your reputation, lose you (real) friends, and leave an incriminating trail for any future employer to find. Even if you are able to regain control of your account via customer service, and could remove the offending material from your page, nothing is every really deleted from the Internet.
And I can remember when ATMs took up whole rooms, and only had $1k of cash available! You really had to know your stuff to get anything out of them!
A related link at the end of the article describes how Sun took one of their Black Box systems to a giant shake table at the seismic research center at UCSD, to see how well it would hold up during an earthquake. Some things pulled loose, and some things will need a little redesign, but it was able to keep functioning during and after the simulated earthquake. Sun produced a slick little video of it.
Here here! I wish I had mod points today.
It used to be that a war's home front consisted of a lot of sacrifice - not just sending the boys off to fight and die, but also making do with less, shortages and rationing, and, of course, higher taxes to pay for the military expenditure. Now we somehow think that we can fight a war without sacrifice. In the particular case of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the President and Congress seemed to feel that we could not only afford a $750 billion open-ended war (probably over $1 trillion before all is said and done), but could even afford tax cuts for the most well-off at the same time.
The President and Congress (2001-present) don't even feel the need to account for the cost of this prolonged war in the normal budget - it requires periodic "emergency" spending so that everyone's precious balanced budget fuzzy calculations can still work out.
Even though I think it's a fax machine in the picture, not an inkjet printer, I think it is safe to say that the image pretty well represents everyone's feelings on this matter.
This doesn't exactly ban or rule out the possibility of gerrymandering, but Iowa instituted a much fairer way of redistricting back in the early 80s. Instead of the legislature drawing the lines, an independent committee (4 appointments from each caucus, plus a chairperson) draws up three new redistricted maps with the following guidelines:
1 - population equality,
2 - contiguity,
3 - unity of counties and cities (maintaining county lines and "nesting" house districts within senate districts and senate districts within congressional districts), and
4 - compactness.
When you look at these guidelines, you'll find it tries to do the same thing that various mathematical algorithms, which others have suggested in response to the parent post, try to do. The three proposed maps are sent to the legislature, who attempt to choose one in a simple take-it-or-leave-it vote, with contingencies if the legislature can't decide on one.
The result is that four of five congressional districts in Iowa are consistently competitive and mirror the state's overall political makeup. Compare that to about 50 of 435 congressional districts nationwide being competitive, despite the nearly even split between Democrats and Republicans.
Some Iowa politicians grumble when they have to move their home to stay within their redrawn district, but by and large everyone feels that the system is fair and equitable. Neither party considers abusing the system, because they realize how blatant it would appear, and because they know that the next time the same abuse could be revisited on them.
I've had to look into finding a keyboard that could be repeatedly autoclaved (high pressure steam at 250-350 Fahrenheit) so that it could be used in an operating room during surgery. I had limited success with that - you can find different keyboards that are encased in silicone. They become unusable after a handful of cleaning cycles, however. The harder part was finding a pointing device - mouse, trackpad, etc.
For myself, I have gone months at a time without a cellphone, TV, computer, or portable music player. I didn't miss them much. This wasn't in the distant past, either, this is several times over the last decade. The key to this was the simple fact that I was well away from the hustle and bustle of my usual life. I was not at my everyday tech job, nor at my heavily tech-invested college, nor even in a major city. For portions of this time I was at a large ranch in the southwest U.S., where the main means of communication was CB radio; in a foreign country that was not heavily modernized; and on a boat skirting oceanic coastline. I didn't miss the tech because there was no real need for it - it would have seemed quite out of place, actually.
I have in recent times, and in my usual techie world, tried to do without a lot of modern gadgetry. By and large, though, it is hard to simply set aside. I am a practicing engineer doing a lot of mechanical design work - I simply could not do my work without a computer. I call up datasheets and other reference information hourly from the Internet. I do not have a landline, and so rely on my cellphone. I type much faster than I write longhand, so I usually email my long-distance friends and relatives instead of sending letters.
I have made some concessions to toning down my digital life. I don't find cable television to be worth the exhorbitant rates they charge, and broadcast TV is filled with a lot of vacuous crap, so I watch about 2 hours of TV a week. My iPod just died; I am waiting to see how the iPhone pans out, or whether Apple will release a 6th-gen iPod this year. Very few people have my cell #, so I receive about 20 calls per week on it; rarely is anything urgent enough that a landline and answering machine couldn't have handled it.
So, I guess one could say that the context matters in how successfully you can ween yourself from technology. Some lifestyles and work-styles have been enabled by modern gadgetry, and simply couldn't exist without it. In other contexts, the gadgetry is superfluous, a sort of reverse anachronism, if you will.
Another analogy:
You have a bathroom in your house. I walk down the street and want to use that bathroom. I walk up to the front door and, since the door isn't locked, waltz on in and do my business. I asked the door if it was OK to come inside (by handshaking, you could say) and, because it didn't bar me access, assumed it was ok. I mean, come on, I can't be held responsible if the owner of the house doesn't know how to lock the door. However, that unlocked door excuse doesn't prevent me from being charged with trespassing, B&E, etc.